The Plot to Kill Ed Koch

Ed Koch pressed the phone to his ear, trying to make sense of what he was being told.

“Listen, my agents have gotten news that there’s a contract out on your life,” CIA Director George H.W. Bush told the New York congressman. “I’m sorry, Ed. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

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It was October 1976, and Koch—a four-term member of Congress who would later serve three terms as the mayor of New York—was sitting in his office in Lower Manhattan as the future president explained the threat against Koch’s life. It seemed, Bush said, that Koch’s efforts to cut off $3 million in U.S. military aid to the Uruguayan government had caught the attention of the Chilean secret police, a close collaborator of the Uruguayan regime. The secret police in Chile had put a bounty on the head of the 52-year-old lawmaker. There wasn’t much the CIA could do about it, Bush told him.

“But George,” the congressman pleaded, a hint of panic rising in his throat. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Ed, be very careful,” Bush said.

Koch had every reason to take the CIA director’s warning seriously. Days earlier, on Sept. 21, a brazen assassination in Washington had shattered the myth that the political violence roiling South America wouldn’t possibly make its way to U.S. soil. The once far-fetched notion that a sitting member of Congress could also be targeted for killing was, suddenly, quite real.

***

The morning air was warm and pregnant with rain as a blue Chevy Chevelle rattled down Massachusetts Avenue in northwest Washington, D.C. At the wheel that morning—a few weeks before Koch would receive his phone call from the CIA—sat Orlando Letelier, a 44-year-old Chilean exile who had once served as his country’s ambassador to the United States. Letelier’s career as a government official was ended forever when, two years earlier, he had been forced to flee Chile after a coup deposed the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, and ushered Gen. Augusto Pinochet into power. An economist by training, Letelier was now ensconced at a Washington think tank, and his life in exile was devoted to criticizing Pinochet’s regime—not just its austere economic policies, but also the violence and brutality perpetrated by its secret police force, the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA).

Letelier had two Americans with him that morning—25-year-old Ronni Karpen Moffitt and, in the backseat, Ronni’s new husband, Michael Moffitt. The couple, who worked with Letelier at the Institute for Policy Studies, had hitched a ride from Bethesda, Md., to their office in Dupont Circle that morning after their Plymouth Duster had failed to start. It was an uneventful trip until the car reached Embassy Row and Letelier steered the sedan toward Sheridan Circle past bustling commuters. Suddenly, as he took the curve of the traffic circle, there was a noise like water pouring over a hot wire. Moments later, the car exploded upward in a burst—the thunderous clap of a car bomb cutting through the hum of morning traffic. Jagged metal and glass shards were blown across the street and into adjacent trees more than 60 feet away. The car slammed into a Volkswagen parked in front of the Romanian Embassy. And there it rested, a plume of smoke rising from its mangled carriage.

Michael Moffitt lay stunned on the circle’s grass, where the blast had deposited him. Sitting in the backseat spared his life; he suffered only minor injuries. He gathered himself and ran to the car across the street, where he tried to pull his slumped wife from the crumpled wreck. She had suffered a ruptured carotid artery and larynx, and died inhaling her own blood. Letelier, too, was gravely injured and writhing in pain. The blast severed both his legs, and he died en route to George Washington University Hospital.

As FBI agents and local police draped what remained of the car in clear plastic, the news of the violence began to spread. Just down the street, six blocks east along Massachusetts Avenue, the Chilean embassy stood—its regal red brick façade serene as rain started to fall. When Letelier had been the ambassador, the building was a kind of palace for him. Now, it represented the official diplomatic organ of a government that had sentenced him to death. The political chaos of Latin America had made its way to the very heart of American power.